Related papers: Weighted Voting on the Blockchain: Improving Conse…
Blockchain technology offers a promising foundation for modernizing E-Voting systems by enhancing transparency, decentralization, and security. Yet, real-world adoption remains limited due to persistent challenges such as scalability…
Blockchain protocols differ in fundamental ways, including the mechanics of selecting users to produce blocks (e.g., proof-of-work vs. proof-of-stake) and the method to establish consensus (e.g., longest chain rules vs. Byzantine…
Countries like Estonia, Norway or Australia developed electronic voting systems, which could be used to realize parliamentary elections with the help of personal computers and the Internet. These systems are completely different in their…
Proof-of-stake (PoS) has emerged as a natural alternative to the resource-intensive Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchain, as was recently seen with the Ethereum Merge. PoS-based blockchains require an initial stake distribution among the…
In this paper, we investigate the impact of reward schemes and committee sizes motivated by governance systems over blockchain communities. We introduce a model for elections with a binary outcome space where there is a ground truth (i.e.,…
The proof-of-work consensus protocol suffers from two main limitations: waste of energy and offering only probabilistic guarantees about the status of the blockchain. This paper introduces SklCoin, a new Byzantine consensus protocol and its…
The consensus protocol is a critical component of distributed ledgers and blockchains. Achieving consensus over a decentralized network poses challenges to transaction finality and performance. Currently, the highest-performing consensus…
The security of most existing cryptocurrencies is based on a concept called Proof-of-Work, in which users must solve a computationally hard cryptopuzzle to authorize transactions (`one unit of computation, one vote'). This leads to enormous…
With the rapid growth of hyperconnected devices and decentralized data architectures, safeguarding Internet of Things (IoT) transactions is becoming increasingly challenging. Blockchain presents a promising solution, yet its effectiveness…
Blockchain protocols implement total-order broadcast in a permissionless setting, where processes can freely join and leave. In such a setting, to safeguard against Sybil attacks, correct processes rely on cryptographic proofs tied to a…
Consensus mechanism is the core technology for blockchain to ensure that transactions are executed in sequence. It also determines the decentralization, security, and efficiency of blockchain. Existing mechanisms all have certain…
We present two attacks targeting the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum consensus protocol. The first attack suggests a fundamental conceptual incompatibility between PoS and the Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree (GHOST) fork choice paradigm…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is applied in various fields, and the number of physical devices connected to the IoT is increasingly growing. There are significant challenges to the IoT's growth and development, mainly due to the centralized…
An important feature of Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains is full dynamic availability, allowing miners to go online and offline while requiring only 50% of the online miners to be honest. Existing Proof-of-stake (PoS), Proof-of-Space and…
Liquid staking has become the largest category of decentralized finance protocols in terms of total value locked. However, few studies exist on its implementation designs or underlying risks. The liquid staking protocols allow for earning…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is a popular consensus protocol used by Bitcoin since its inception. PoW has the well-known flaw of assigning all the reward to the single miner (or pool) that inserts the new block. This has the consequence of making…
In this paper, we propose a trust-centric privacy-preserving blockchain for dynamic spectrum access in IoT networks. To be specific, we propose a trust evaluation mechanism to evaluate the trustworthiness of sensing nodes and design a…
With the promise of greater decentralization and sustainability, Ethereum transitioned from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. The new consensus protocol introduces novel vulnerabilities that warrant…
Proof-of-Stake blockchains based on a longest-chain consensus protocol are an attractive energy-friendly alternative to the Proof-of-Work paradigm. However, formal barriers to "getting the incentives right" were recently discovered, driven…
Decentralization is a key indicator for the evaluation of public blockchains. In the past, there have been very few studies on measuring and comparing the actual level of decentralization between Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains and…